Over the past couple of days I've downloaded BeOS PE, installed it within Windows, created a new partition on a second hard drive, and installed BeOS on that partition. Not too tough...

The problem is finding a way to boot any of the three operating systems I now have (Windows 98, Linux, and BeOS). Neither the BeOS Bootman nor XOSL can load Linux without Lilo. Lilo and Grub can't see BeOS...

Trying to install Lilo on the second hard drive boot sector (\dev\hdb) gets me an error message:
Installation of Lilo failed. Following error occured: Fatal: No images have been found.

The XOSL webpage says they are working on being able to load Linux in the next version. Until then am I stuck loading Linux each time with a boot disk? Can anyone recommend a bootloader that can load each of the OSs? Anyone know why I'm getting that error message?

Thanks,
Bob W

Bob,

There's a number of reasonably simple solutions.

First, install LILO or GRUB to your Linux boot partition (not your *system's* boot partition). I read in your message that you're running into a problem with this, but you're on the right track.

With a Linux boot loader installed ON your bootable Linux partition (again, NOT on the system partition), you can use the Be boot loader (point it to the Linux boot partition containing LILO). You could also use a different boot loader other than Be's in much the same way.

On my system, I've got

* PC-DOS 2000 (with the Windows for
Workgroups 3.11 operating environment)

* MS-DOS 7.10a (with the Windows 98
Second Edition operating environment)

* Windows NT 4.0 Workstation (two
installations--one for "production"
and a separate minimal installation
on a separate drive for backups,
repairs,emergencies, testing, etc.)

* BeOS Professional 5.0 (again, two
bootable copies)

* Solaris 8 (5.8)

* Red Hat Linux 7.2 (two copies)

I use Microsoft's NT OS loader to boot EVERYTHING. The NT OS loader is probably the only Microsoft product I've seen that I'm completely happy with. If only they could do so well with the rest of their software!

Now, as for the problem that's keeping you from installing LILO to your Linux boot partition...

It sounds as if either you don't have a kernel image where you're telling LILO you've got one. Either the kernel image is missing, corrupt, or inaccessible, or (more likely), you've got an error in your LILO config file (/etc/lilo.conf). Nine times out of ten, it's something stupid like a mis-configured lilo.conf or forgetting to flag the partition as active (not necessary with every boot loader) or something like that.

I hope this is of some help.

Have a great New Year's!

It Works! Re-installing Linux got rid of the error message. From there it was relatively simple. So now I turn on the computer and at the BeOS Bootloader I choose from Grub, Windows, or Be. From Grub I can boot Linux.

I assume that any other Unix-based OSs will also have to be loaded from Grub instead of the primary bootloader, FreeBSD for instance. Correct?

I bet I'm not the only one anticipating the day that XOSL can boot Linux!

Thank you Andrew for your help.
Best Wishes,
Bob W